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Conventional Forces Combing Afghanistan
Monday, September 30, 2002
(14:20 ET)
By Matthew Rosenberg
Associated Press Writer

A squad was walking past a stone compound when they noticed a locked door. The owner of the compound couldn’t produce a key, so Spc. Ben Refroe kicked the door open. Inside, there were more than a thousand rounds of heavy machine-gun ammunition, 250 rocket-propelled grenades, mortar shells still in their foam packing, grenades, and land mines.

MASI KALAY, Afghanistan -- AP
Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne are combing the rugged mountains that border Pakistan in a new U.S. military strategy emphasizing conventional forces rather than elite troops in the search for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters.

In a strong show of force, more than 200 soldiers swept into a number of villages in southeastern Afghanistan on Sunday and uncovered a giant cache of weapons: hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades, thousands of rounds of heavy machine gun ammunition and dozens of mortar rounds.

For months, the military has relied mostly on small special forces units in the region, one of the most active fronts in the U.S.-led hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban. But since late August, conventional forces -- mostly drawn from the 82nd Airborne -- began moving from Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military headquarters north of Kabul, and from Kandahar in the south, to growing bases along the volatile Pakistani border.

Having greater numbers of U.S. troops in the area means a large force can more swiftly move in if al-Qaida and Taliban operatives are encountered, said Col. Martin Schweizter, the commander of the operation. “Being in this particular region right now, we believe it’s a target-rich environment,” he said.
(More: Marietta Daily Journal Online News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

I wonder when they’ll start wiring the locked doors to the cached explosives...

Dan